Incomplete And Utter History Of Classical Music

FROM BEGGARS' OPERA TO COMMON MAN

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es, the year that produced the Bolero also produced a new style of opera in Berlin. The words were by Bertolt Brecht, after the eighteenth-century John Gay (yes I know John Gay didn't get into this book in his own right, so to speak, but I'm afraid his century was full. I mean it was standing room only and he fell out the back.) And the music was from Kurt Weill, who, despite coming next to Anton Webernja in many of the music books, thought that music should be readily appreciable by the people. None of the boffin-type, system music for him - he thought that his audience should be humming his tunes before they left the theatre. Of course, he couldn't resist giving it a boffin name, could he - 'Zeitkunst' or 'contemporary art', really. I don't know, they just can't help themselves, can they? What's wrong with MUSIC, for goodness' sake? Anyway, if he was the people end of things, and S g, Webern and Berg were the other end, then skipping backwards and forwards in the middle was the wonderful, slightly dotty character of the forty-six-year-old Stravinsky. He was virtually a portfolio of ALL the different schools of modern music in one. Never stuck to one thing for too long. Much as in life, he was a series of not-so-much contradictions, as, well, fl I know Vve said this before, but, on this occasion, it's true. Honest. 1» Another follower of Schoenberj}. U-turns, I suppose. He went from block to block, in a sense, as if he was on stepping stones. One minute, he's just MODERN - although Stravinsky himself once famously said that he didn't write modern music, he just wrote good music - anyway, one minute he's modern, then he's using the S g rules of harmony, and then the next minute he's almost 'classical' - or neo-classical, as the boffins like to say. From the Greek 'neo' meaning new, so not the original classical music, but the twentieth century's revisited version of it. So in 1930, he came up with one of my most favourite pieces, ever - the Symphony of Psalms. It's extraordinary stuff- a spooky-sounding cantata for chorus and orchestra, which can leave you in tears one minute then have you thinking of horror movies the next. It was just every bit as good as that other great hit from 1930, Hoagy Carmichael's 'Georgia on My Mind'. Ah, a belter. And, who knows, maybe playing in the background when CW Tombaugh discovered Pluto. 1930, you see. A good year. But roll on 1934.